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Memoirs of the Addams Administration 14.

The historian Fernand Braudel distinguished between long term trends and the “mere history of events.” It’s a useful concept to bear in mind when analyzing political developments. However, Braudel would be the first to admit that events can illustrate trends.

As early as the 1950s, Democrats turned to seeking changes in the law through the courts when they could not obtain them through the legislature. Two can play at this game. Both parties have spent a great deal of effort getting “their” judges on the bench while blocking the other guys’ judges from getting on the bench. Polarization has only made the problem more obvious. In 2013, when last in the majority, Senate Democrats chose to get rid of the filibuster for all judicial appointments below the level of the Supreme Court. When Justice Antonin Scalia died, President Obama nominated a highly qualified Democratic replacement; Senate Republicans refused to even hold hearings on the nominee. Now in the minority, Senate Democrats chose to filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and Republicans chose to do away with the filibuster.[1] This unhappy event is merely the most recent phase in the politicization of the judiciary. The mind reels at possible future developments.

Human-caused climate change is a reality. So, too, is the halting effort by industrial countries to limit the further emission of pollutants that cause that climate change. So, too, are the social and economic costs of fighting climate change in industrial societies. When interest groups resist the threats to their immediate well-being, governments can either bend before the resistance, or seek to off-set those costs, or seek to circumvent the resistance by other means. Thus, President Barack Obama insisted that the Paris climate agreement to which his administration adhered not be a treaty.[2] He knew he could never get such a treaty through the Senate, as required by the Constitution. Nor could he get the policies needed to implement the Paris agreement through Congress. So, he resorted to a “Clean Power Plan” issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Trump administration ordered a re-write of the Plan and “requested” that the EPA lighten up on other regulations.[3] Most observers found this to be ridiculous pandering to his core voters.[4] In this view, coal is a dying industry, climate change has to be resisted with energy,[5] and renewable energy is a key technology of the future economy.

American social values and the deficiencies of the American education system have challenged the growth of the high-tech industries for many years.[6] In brief compass, America doesn’t produce enough techies to meet the needs of growing industries. The solution appeared in the hiring of many (85,000 new people a year) from foreign countries. The granting of H-1B visas plays a key role in this process. Now the Trump administration has issued orders intended to hinder the issuing of such visas.[7] The empty spots aren’t likely to be filled by displaced coal miners.

[3] Relax the rules on emissions by power plants to be constructed in the future; allow new coal mining on public lands; and ease restrictions on the emission of methane in the course of “fracking.”

[4] As an employer, the whole of the coal industry ranks behind some fast-food chains. Coal mine employment has fallen by almost 50 percent since 1990, long before the Clean Power Plan was even a twinkle in Barack Obama’s eye. “The bottom line,” The Week, 14 April 2017, p. 35.